{"id":890,"date":"2010-09-30T12:40:45","date_gmt":"2010-09-30T12:40:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/?p=890"},"modified":"2010-10-04T12:46:24","modified_gmt":"2010-10-04T12:46:24","slug":"recognition-for-eggcorns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/2010\/09\/30\/recognition-for-eggcorns\/","title":{"rendered":"Recognition for eggcorns"},"content":{"rendered":"

It seems eggcorns are having their day. The word has just been added to the Oxford English Online Dictionary, according to the Boston Globe<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re not sure what an eggcorn is, here\u2019s the official definition: \u201can alteration of a word or phrase through the mishearing or reinterpretation of one or more of its elements as a similar-sounding word.\u201d So if you, like Joey from Friends, say \u201cit\u2019s a moo point\u201d<\/a> rather than \u201cmoot point\u201d, you\u2019re using an eggcorn.<\/p>\n

Eggcorn seems like an odd word though \u2013 what\u2019s its origin?<\/p>\n

The term derives from \u201cegg corn\u201d as a substitution for \u201cacorn,\u201d whose earliest appearance comes in an 1844 letter from an American frontiersman: \u201cI hope you are as harty as you ust to be and that you have plenty of egg corn bread which I can not get her and I hop to help you eat some of it soon.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why would eggcorn (as we now spell it) replace acorn in the writer\u2019s lexicon? As the OED editors comment, \u201cacorns are, after all, seeds which are somewhat egg-shaped, and in many dialects the formations acorn and eggcorn sound very similar.\u201d (And, like corn kernels, acorns can be ground into meal or flour.) This coinage came to the attention of the linguists blogging at Language Log in 2003, and at the suggestion of Geoffrey Pullum, one of the site\u2019s founders, it was adopted as the term for all such expressions.<\/p>\n

Eggcorns needed their own label, the Language Loggers decided, because they were mistakes of a distinct sort \u2014 variants on the traditional phrasing, but ones that still made at least a bit of sense. \u201cNip it in the bud,\u201d for instance, is a horticultural metaphor, perhaps not so widely understood as it once was; the newer \u201cnip it in the butt\u201d describes a different strategy for getting rid of some unwelcome visitation, but it\u2019s not illogical. Hamlet said he was \u201cto the manner born,\u201d but the modern alteration, \u201cto the manor born,\u201d is also a useful formula. (Source: Boston.com)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Does anyone have any interesting eggcorns to share? If not, take a look at the Eggcorn Database<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It seems eggcorns are having their day. The word has just been added to the Oxford English Online Dictionary, according to the Boston Globe. If you\u2019re not sure what an eggcorn is, here\u2019s the official definition: \u201can alteration of a word or phrase through the mishearing or reinterpretation of one or more of its elements […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,44],"tags":[862,861,51],"class_list":["post-890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-words","tag-eggcorn-definition","tag-eggcorns","tag-language"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=890"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":892,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/890\/revisions\/892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}